Meeting Abstract
The sensory substrates of foraging in bumblebees are incompletely understood – as such this is an area of active investigation. When studying foraging behavior of bumblebees in a laboratory setting, collecting data on an individual-level, rather than a colony-level, greatly increases the sample size and statistical power of the data. Historically, the tracking of individual bees has been done by gluing numbered tags to each bee and manually observing behavior. This technique has serious drawbacks at a primarily undergraduate institution – where students may not have large blocks of time to devote to observation. Open-source RFID reader technology has now made automated logging of individual bees affordable in a liberal arts setting. Utilizing 3-D printed feeder lids that hold an RFID antenna, we were able to successfully log feeding events from tagged bees. However, given that our lab is investigating the role of olfaction in foraging, the issue of a stimulus remained. Pumping air through syringes containing filter-paper scented with essential oil/s can provide an odor stimulus in the foraging chambers housing RFID-equipped feeders. However, constant air flow could weaken the stimulus strength rapidly, resulting in less consistent odor presentation. As such, we designed a motion activated stimulus system. Through the use of an open source arduino microcontroller, a PIR motion sensor turns on an air pump to intermittently puff odor bursts into the foraging chamber/s. The burst length, the inter-burst interval, and the number of bursts are readily customizable. As such, the system can easily be modulated to serve the needs of other research laboratories. The use of automated stimulus presentation and data collection through affordable microcontrollers promises to be an excellent tool for undergraduate researchers.
